Actually, many members of the MindArk team follow the vibrant and insightful discussions on community forums. It often happens that ideas proposed by the community are taken into account or even implemented into our design plans.
What exactly are you defining as "community forums"? If that just means reading planetcalypsoforum and not reading entropiaplanets, or any of the other huge number of forums, some of which are in English and others that are not, that exists, perhaps redefining what that means may be a good idea? Just having the AMA here on pcf and not in a more 'neutral' location or on other planet forums actually seems to be annoying some according to some of the posts on non-pcf forums I've read recently...
Having personally put in a lot of wish list threads over the years, and following a lot of the forums, I do see implementation of some ideas over time, but yes, feedback that actually shows where and how those ideas got implemented is very lacking... and in some cases, even when things do get implemented there's no one from developer side going back to make sure that what did get implemented was implemented correctly...
Let me give you best example of that that I've personally seen... A good many months back on Cyrene...
In above examples, best I can see of a pp actually listening to participants, they implemented several ideas I suggested or mentioned issues with but introduced problems that didn't get noticed at first as well, and some of which I don't think has been resolved yet...
Mazeweaver
- The Maze Hammer has been adjusted from L to UL.
- Any players will additional Maze Hammers may trade them to Mazeweaver Ricardo at the <name> teleporter in exchange for 50000 Shrapnel.
- The Maze ending marker has been adjusted and at the end of the Maze there is now a warp that will take you directly outside.
- Vlad the Unraveler now can drop Mazeweaver Certificates.
Vlad stopped looting ANYTHING at all when you killed him.... He still completed the mission daily for you, but as he's the highest hp mob in the maze, that's a problem for those doing the maze mission daily.
The waypoint at the end of the maze is higher than the floor so you have to jump up to actually reach it with your avatar... subsequent forum posts explained that but on initial implementation it wasn't explained.
NPC Ricardo still doesn't do what the above quote says he does as far as I can tell from last time I checked... he's just nonresponsive.
I suspect little things like this happen all of the time all over the place... PPs try to get done what participants want done and then no subsequent checks are done by PP or Mindark, so bugs get introduced, or things only get halfway installed but never actually gets 'done' the right way, and it goes on for months or years unresolved or only half way fixed....
so we end up with stuff like forests growing in the basements of turned around apartments, booths hanging upside down, in Omegaton, Missions unable to be completed, etc.
The QA - Quality Assurance controls and checks don't seem to be in place anywhere in this game... and based on what I've read about support tickets, etc. issues are only addressed after a lot of support tickets are sent in, almost like the number of support cases for any one issue is a weirdly democratic type of thing where increased number of support cases will be only way any particular issue gets resolved, and all other issues go to the bottom of the to do list, possibly never resolved ever... to the point where some players actually create forum threads requesting other players send in support tickets about certain issues to raise up the potential that their particular issue may be resolved... that's a problem in my opinion.
The AMA type stuff here is great, and I'm glad you are starting to communicate more with the community, but if it's a one and done type of thing like previous Q&A sessions were in the past, where a small string of things happen to help, but then it all goes dead again after a few months that's not going to be too helpful... hope that trend doesn't continue.
